Nurturing the economy and environment at the same time is a tough balancing act

William M. Bowen is professor of public administration and urban studies at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University. He's also associate editor of the International Journal of Energy Technology and Policy.

The specter of global climate change appears all over the place in discussions about energy policy these days, often in uninformed and highly politicized formats. Having little taste for strident political opinions unsubstantiated by scientific research, I decided to do my best to provide some informed, analytical commentary on the topic. My background includes having taught Weather and Climate at Indiana University for a couple of years. I wanted to update my knowledge before commenting on climate change, so I started by taking a course on climate change from Richard Wolfson, professor of physics at Middlebury College. Then I spent a couple of weeks combing through the literature published by the most credible scientific sources I could imagine, such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. Here are the questions I asked and the best brief, analytical answers I could obtain. Has climate changed over the past century? Yes. The earth's climate changes continually and has done so since long before human activities could possibly have influenced it.

Are greenhouse gas concentrations increasing in the atmosphere? An abundance of highly credible data is clear and unequivocal on this one; the answer is “yes.”Does this increase lead to a general warming of the planet? The data leave no reasonable room to doubt that over time the correlation between greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the global temperature has been consistently very high. Moreover, greenhouse gas theory — the same theory used to successfully explain observed anomalies in the planetary temperatures of Venus, Earth and Mars — implies that the answer is “yes.” But this being said, as I always tell my students, correlation does not necessarily imply causation.Are humans partially responsible for this increase? The data clearly show that the Industrial Revolution began and diffused from Great Britain just about exactly along with an enormous increase in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This relationship makes perfect sense. The Industrial Revolution was powered by fossil fuels which, when burned, put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Call me na´ve or ideological if you want, but in light of this I cannot help but think that the answer must be “yes.”Will the climate continue to change over the next century? Scientifically, any sort of projection of a trend in to the future amounts to an operation on the available data about the past. Accordingly, given past trends, together with the huge increases in fossil fuel consumption necessary to power growing populations in China, India, and the United States, among other places, I cannot imagine that the increase in global temperatures will do anything other than continue.

What will be the environmental and social impact of such change? This is a huge and exceedingly difficult question to answer. At the same time, the answer is crucially important for deciding on a proper course for greenhouse gas emission reduction policies.From what I can tell, we know that agriculture, forestry, unmanaged ecosystems, oceans, disease vectors, energy consumption, and water resources will all likely be affected, among other factors. But aggregate, monetary estimates of the particular impacts are all over the place. There is so much uncertainty in these estimates that in my judgment the noise outweighs the signal. What policy responses should be taken? This is a multitrillion-dollar question, and one that scientists cannot even begin to answer. The fact that climate change is and will remain a global issue means that neither local, state nor national energy policymakers in the United States can make their decisions independently of their counterparts living in China, India, Brazil and elsewhere, many of whom do not share their political or economic interests. It also means it is no longer reasonable for these decision-makers to take the time-honored and relatively simple approach of monetizing the value of the social, economic and ecological costs of alternative actions today and balancing them against their corresponding future benefits.To my mind, the best approach at this point is to avoid either extreme.There is little room for doubt that global temperatures will continue to rise for the coming decades, and indeed rise considerably; so it seems to me that it would be wrongheaded for policymakers to do absolutely nothing. On the other hand, given that no matter what local, state or national energy policymakers do, people from around the world will continue to want to grow their economies. They will continue to consume greater amounts of fossil fuel, and will emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, so it would be equally wrongheaded to severely damage local and state interests by attempting to stop global warming in its tracks.

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